Candid portraits of Monroe are spot on

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London: Up close and personal, the camera could detect what the
film studios would never have allowed an audience to see - that
Marilyn Monroe, though never less than beautiful ... had spots.

An exhibition in London of portraits by the photographer Eve
Arnold - who is 95 and still working - includes many previously
unseen images revealing the flaws behind the dazzling image: strap
marks in one of the famous series of Monroe naked in bed, a tiny
sag of flesh in a bikini shot.

The two met at a party in the 1950s, soon after Arnold had
photographed a recording session of Marlene Dietrich singing
Lili Marlene. The images were published, without the
retouching then considered mandatory for stars, in
Esquire.

Arnold recalls, in her introduction to the book accompanying the
exhibition: "Marilyn asked, with that mixture of naivety and
self-promotion that was uniquely hers: 'If you could do that well
with Marlene, can you imagine what you can do with me?"'

The photographer believes Monroe was clever enough to realise
that the trademark Arnold style, an apparently artless naturalness,
would make her more memorable than the ranks of near identical,
heavily made up, glossy studio portraits of Hollywood starlets.

"For me she was a joy to photograph: as her fame increased she
became a source of many magazine pages, and having access to her
earned me a certain cachet in editors' eyes," Arnold said .

She photographed Monroe six times over 10 years. When Monroe
died in 1962, Arnold was left with thousands of photographs, and
embargoed all but the handful already released.

"Because of the unique but complicated relationship that
sometimes exists between photographer and subject, she stayed on
the screen of my mind ... 25 years after her death, I am still
haunted by her as she appeared before my lens," Arnold said.